FAMILY COUNSELLING

GROUP MEMBERS:
RISHAV KUMAR (B.A J&MC)
YASHWANT SHARMA
RAHUL SINGH
 Introduction to Family Therapy

• Family therapy, also referred to as couple and family therapy, marriage and
family therapy, family systems therapy, and family counseling, is a branch of
psychotherapy that works with families and couples in intimate relationships to
nurture change and development.
• It tends to view change in terms of the systems of interaction between family
members.
• It emphasizes family relationships as an important factor in psychological
health.
• The different schools of family therapy have in common a belief that,
regardless of the origin of the problem, and regardless of whether the clients
consider it an individual or family issue, involving families in solutions often
benefits clients.
• This involvement of families is commonly accomplished by their direct
participation in the therapy session. The skills of the family therapist thus
include the ability to influence conversations in a way that catalyzes the
strengths, wisdom, and support of the wider system.
• In the field's early years, many clinicians defined the family in a narrow,
traditional manner usually including parents and children.
• As the field has evolved, the concept of the family is more commonly
defined in terms of strongly supportive, long-term roles and relationships
between people who may or may not be related by blood or marriage
• The conceptual frameworks developed by family therapists, especially
those of family systems theorists, have been applied to a wide range of
human behavior, including organizational dynamics and the study of
greatness.
• Family Therapy requires members to adhere to a Code of Ethics,
including a commitment to continue therapeutic relationships only so
long as it is reasonably clear that clients are benefiting from the
relationship.
 History and Theoretical Frameworks
• Formal interventions with families to help individuals and families experiencing various kinds of
problems have been a part of many cultures, probably throughout history. These interventions
have sometimes involved formal procedures or rituals, and often included the extended family as
well as non-kin members of the community.
• Following the emergence of specialization in various societies, these interventions were often
conducted by particular members of a community for example, a chief, priest, physician, and so
on usually as an ancillary function.
• Family therapy as a distinct professional practice within Western cultures can be argued to have
had its origins in the social work movements of the 19th century in the United Kingdom and the
United States. As a branch of psychotherapy, its roots can be traced somewhat later to the early
20th century with the emergence of the child guidance movement and marriage counseling.
• The formal development of family therapy dates to the 1940s and early 1950s with the founding
in 1942 of the American Association of Marriage Counselors (the precursor of the AAMFT), and
through the work of various independent clinicians and groups, in the United Kingdom, the
United States, and Hungary who began seeing family members together for observation or
therapy sessions.
• The movement received an important boost starting in the early 1950s through the work of
anthropologist Gregory Bateson and colleagues at Palo Alto in the United States, who introduced
ideas from cybernetics and general systems theory into social psychology and psychotherapy,
focusing in particular on the role of communication.
• This approach eschewed the traditional focus on individual psychology and historical factors that
involve so-called linear causation and content and emphasized instead feedback and homeostatic
mechanisms and rules in here-and-now interactions, so-called circular causation and process that
were thought to maintain or exacerbate problems, whatever the original cause.
• From the mid 1980s to the present, the field has been marked by a diversity of approaches that
partly reflect the original schools, but which also draw on other theories and methods from
individual psychotherapy and elsewhere these approaches and sources include: brief therapy,
structural therapy, constructivist approaches (e.g., Milan systems, post-
Milan/collaborative/conversational, reflective), solution-focused therapy, narrative therapy, a
range of cognitive and behavioral approaches, psychodynamic and object relations approaches,
attachment and Emotionally Focused Therapy, intergenerational approaches, network therapy,
and multi-systemic therapy (MST). Multicultural, intercultural, and integrative approaches are
being developed.
 Techniques

Family therapy uses a range of counseling and other techniques including:

• Structural therapy - Looks at the Identifies and Re-Orders the organization of the
family system
• Strategic therapy - Looks at patterns of interactions between family members
• Systemic/Milan therapy - Focuses on belief systems
• Narrative Therapy - Restoring of dominant problem-saturated narrative, emphasis
on context, separation of the problem from the person
• Transgenerational Therapy - Transgenerational transmission of unhelpful patterns
of belief and behavior.
• The number of sessions depends on the situation, but the average is 5-20 sessions.
• A family therapist usually meets several members of the family at the same time. This
has the advantage of making differences between the ways family members perceive
mutual relations as well as interaction patterns in the session apparent both for the
therapist and the family.
• These patterns frequently mirror habitual interaction patterns at home, even though
the therapist is now incorporated into the family system.
• Therapy interventions usually focus on relationship patterns rather than on analyzing
impulses of the unconscious mind or early childhood trauma of individuals as a
Freudian therapist would do, although some schools of family therapy, for example
psychodynamic and intergenerational, do consider such individual and historical
factors (thus embracing both linear and circular causation) and they may use
instruments such as the genogram to help to elucidate the patterns of relationship
across generations.
• The distinctive feature of family therapy is its perspective and analytical
framework rather than the number of people present at a therapy session.
• Specifically, family therapists are relational therapists: They are generally more
interested in what goes on between individuals rather than within one or more
individuals, although some family therapists, in particular those who identify as
psychodynamic, object relations, intergenerational, or experiential family
therapists (EFTs) tend to be as interested in individuals as in the systems those 6
individuals and their relationships constitute.
• Depending on the conflicts at issue and the progress of therapy to date, a
therapist may focus on analyzing specific previous instances of conflict, as by
reviewing a past incident and suggesting alternative ways family members
might have responded to one another during it, or instead proceed directly to
addressing the sources of conflict at a more abstract level, as by pointing out
patterns of interaction that the family might have not noticed.
• Family therapists tend to be more interested in the maintenance and/or
solving of problems rather than in trying to identify a single cause. Some
families may perceive cause-effect analyses as attempts to allocate blame to
one or more individuals, with the effect that for many families a focus on
causation is of little or no clinical utility.
• It is important to note that a circular way of problem evaluation is used as
opposed to a linear route. Using this method, families can be helped by
finding patterns of behavior, what the causes are, and what can be done to
better their situation.